Hello Twins fans,

We’ve been trying to sprinkle in new podcasts every month or so over the off-season with some very limited success. We will be back in earnest very soon to bring you bulks of nonsense.

Thanks for your continued support.

- Twinscast

I do not believe in hyperbole. I don’t even really believe in praise.

On July 22 after an 0-3 performance in a 16-1 loss to the Oakland A’s, Joe Mauer’s batting average dipped to a season low .357

In his first 45 games Mauer hit .417 with 14 home runs and 42 RBI, he was slugging .744 and his OPS was 1.229.

It was a historic stretch of hitting by any standard.

But from June 21 through that 0-3 performance in Oakland, Mauer struggled. He hit .253 with 1 home run and 7 RBI in 25 games, and the idea of a .400 season - along with Sports Illustrated covers questioning as much - fell out of the public consciousness.

While the next .400 season - along with the breaking of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak - may be the Atlantis of the baseball world, it is important to note that Mauer is still staring straight in the face of baseball history.

After that month long slump Mauer has hit .414 with 5 home runs and 17 RBI in 17 games, slugging .714 with a 1.182 OPS.

Those numbers bring to mind his insane start to the season, but more importantly they have raised his batting average to .369, and that puts him in a unique position.

Since 1930 only six American League hitters have finished the season with a batting average over .372.

Al Simmons hit .381 and .390 in 1930 and 1931 for the Philadelphia Athletics.

Luke Appling hit .388 in 1936 for the Chicago White Sox.

Joe DiMaggio hit .381 in 1939.

Ted Williams had the last .400 season in 1941 hitting .406 and, without question more impressively, also hit .388 16-years later in 1957.

It would be another twenty years before another hitter would hit higher than .372 when Rod Carew did it for the Twins in 1977.

Three years later George Brett hit .390, and that’s it.

Since 1980 no hitter has ever reached .373.

Two hitters have come close. Nomar Garciaparra hit .372 in 2000 and Ichiro Suzuki, Mauer’s only competition for the AL batting title this season, hit .372 in 2004.

Simmons, Appling, DiMaggio, Williams, Carew and Brett.

It’s an absolute murder’s row (Simmons and Appling may act as the deans of armed robbery) of some of the most complete hitters in the history of baseball, all of them in Cooperstown - and Ichiro and his .372 in 2004 will certainly be there, and Nomar, with his.372 in 2000 and his 791 hits before his 27th birthday was on the path before a fastball to the wrist derailed his career.

You can’t say that Mauer is underrated in any sense. Listen to any national broadcast of a Twins game or the broadcast of the opposing team and the accolidic verbal streams that come with every Mauer at-bat are almost without comparison.

Pujols draws similar raves, but whenever a former baseball player is in the booth they talk about Mauer’s game with an almost with freakish sense of reverence.

It is most likely because while power-hitters come along often - and Pujols is redefining the bar for a power-hitter in the post-testing-era - a player like Mauer, because of his position, has the chance to be once in a lifetime.

He already has his stake in the annals of baseball. His .347 average in 2006 made him the first catcher in the history of the game to lead both leagues in batting average.

But if Mauer, at 26, can secure a third batting title in four years and creep that average up a mere four points - a daunting task, I understand - he will most likely secure the American League MVP, regardless of the Twins record, and move into the rarefied air of having the potential to be the greatest player to ever play one of the nine positions on the field.

It’s not hyperbole or false praise and all apologies are due to Johnny Bench, but its true, and its historic, and even if everything else about the Minnesota Twins looks awful, it’s happening right in-front of our eyes.

After going 5-2 to start inter-league play this season the Twins dropped two disappointing games at home to the Houston Astros to fall one-game under .500 at 35-56 and four games behind the Tigers in the AL Central.

 Since that game the Twins are 8-4 having won four consecutive series, including this weekend against the division leading Tigers, and are now a season-high three games over .500 and two games out of the division lead.

By no means a monumental swing of record but an important stretch of games considering the Twins won three of those four series on the road, something they had done only twice all season.

So what happened to help the Twins get marginally straightened out? For starters a number of players are just hitting better.

Here are the offensive splits with the top line showing stats from June 23-July 5 and the bottom line showing cumulative stats on June 21 after the Houston loss.

I have added comments to some of the players - including the most bizarre set of Brendan Harris RBI statistics ever produced.

Justin Morneau (12 games)

.340 avg./.436 obp./.745 slg.

.320 avg./.393 obp./.575 slg.

Easily the most important turn-around in this stretch, after hitting .220 with one home run through 15 games in early to mid-June Morneau has 4 doubles, 5 home runs and 12 RBI in the Twins four series wins. He has quietly (as is the Morneau way) climbed back into second-place in the American League in home runs (21) and RBI (69).

He will not be on the cover of Sports Illustrated anytime soon.

Brendan Harris (12 games)

.189/.179/.245

.291/.346/.407

Harris has had the most drastic fall in terms of average and OBP during the teams recent success but that beguiles one of the oddest stretches of RBI production in recent memory. Coming into June 23 Harris was hitting .291 with his .346 OBP but had only 13 RBI in 217 plate appearances. Since that time he has gone only 10-53 but has 9 RBI in 56 plate appearances.

Oddities:

1. Three of his nine RBI have come on sacrifice flies (June 24, 25 at Milwaukee and June 28 at St. Louis), and Harris also recorded four of his 10 hits in those three games only one of which resulted in another RBI - an RBI single against St. Louis on the 28th. So, in those three games Harris went 4-15 with four RBI but only one RBI came on an actual hit. These sac-flies also help explain how Harris has his three extra plate appearances though he has no walks and why his on-base percentage is once again lower than his batting average - a freakish occurrence that only Harris seems capable of pulling off for the Twins simply because Delmon Young doesn’t hit sacrifice flies.

2. Of his six remaining RBI one came on a three-run, bases-clearing bloop single with two outs in the second inning against St. Louis on June 27 (Harris recorded another of his 10 hits in that game though no RBI this time). The hit bounced off the glove of a diving Chris Duncan in left and dribbled toward short center-field which should help explain how Harris cleared the bases even though he didn’t make it to second. And another RBI came on a triple (Harris’ first of the year) that followed a Denard Span triple in the Twins 16-inning loss to Detroit on Friday.

In that game Harris went 1-8 with that lone RBI, and scored a run on a Joe Mauer sacrifice fly.

Delmon Young (5 games)

.400/.429/.650

.251/.278/.316

Coming into the Milwaukee series Young had appeared in 47 of the Twins first 71 games producing six extra-base hits and 22 RBI while hitting .253 and taking only five walks. This lead to Twins fans everywhere (including Bryant and I) calling for his head.

Since then Young has been primarily relegated to the bench - in the Twins 8-4 stretch Young has appeared in five games and started in four accumulating only 20 at-bats - but a funny thing has happened: in those 20 at-bats Young has eight hits, two doubles and a home run with the added bonus of his sixth walk of the season. While riding the bench through the teams last 12 games Young has increased his extra-base hits by a third and picked up three RBI and his sixth walk in the process.

Joe Christensen’s article in the Sunday Star Tribune also pointed out that Young may be opening up to his coach’s suggestions about hitting.

Michael Cuddyer (12 games)

.283/.382/.500

.277/.355/.519

Cuddyer is on his way to his second-best season, his 13 home runs are already the third most in his career and only three behind his 16 total from 2007 and he is on-pace to hit for over 90 RBI for only the second time in his career. In this stretch Cuddyer had the second-most extra-base hits for the Twins with 4 doubles and 2 home runs, and also added 8 RBI.

Joe Mauer (12 games)

.318/.426/.341

.407/.475/.727

Hitting only .318 with a mere 7 runs, 3 RBI and 9 walks (2 intentional) in 12 games Mauer continues his historic free-fall as the SI-jinx continues to reverberate.

(Mauer should enter the leader-boards following Tuesday’s game against the Yankees at which point he will lead the American League in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging and OPS)

Joe Crede (10 games)

.267/.283/.444

.226/.307/.446

2 doubles, 2 home runs, 6 RBI

Carlos Gomez (10 games, 5 starts)

.261/.292/.435

.219/.279/.311

2 doubles, 1 triple, 1 walk, 2 RBI

Jason Kubel (10 games)

.243/.282/.405

.312/.373/.552

3 doubles, 1 home run, 3 RBI

Denard Span (10 games) came off the disabled list on June 25.

.289/.373/.378

.291/.380/.386

Span had a slight rough patch after a solid first game back going 0-9 in two games but Span is 12-34 since and has 9 runs, 2 triples, 3 RBI and 6 walks since coming off the DL.

Matt Tolbert (9 games, 6 starts)

.250/.333/.250

.168/.261/.228

1 RBI

Nick Punto (7 games)

.211/.400/.211

.221/.312/.248

It should be noted that Punto is taking a high number of walks (currently fifth on the team with 26) and his one RBI in this seven game stretch was the game winner against the Tigers on Saturday.

Not exactly a foundation to build a house on, but lets not shove him in the crapper, either.

 ——————————–

While none of this means the team is clicking on all cylinders (the White Sox at 9-3 have a better record over their previous 14) the Twins are showing what they can do when their offense and pitching get in-sync a bit, and are also showing that they can win on the road.

One more thing to take notice of is a suddenly solid bullpen.

It will be interesting to see if Bobby Keppel can keep up his stellar start with a 0.00 ERA in 7.2 innings but you add his quality appearances with Guerrier’s 2.58 ERA in 38.1 innings, Dickey’s 2.96 ERA in 48.2 innings (and yeah Dickey got his first loss of the season in that marathon against the Tigers, but the bullpen threw a complete game shutout from the fifth to the thirteenth) and Mijares’s 2.16 ERA in 25 innings and suddenly the bullpen in-front of Nathan is starting to take-on a nice shape.

With the Twins two games back and the White Sox 2.5 games back with just under half-a-season left to play its starting to look like another fun summer in the AL Central.

1. I was 12-years-old when my grandfather Dennis Poduska died. It was my first experience with death and, as most first experiences go, I was bad at it.

After the burial as everyone was walking from the grave to their cars I turned to my uncle and said something along the lines of, “Well, at least now Grandpa is up in heaven with all of his favorite Yankees.”

My uncle didn’t give me the kind of response I had wanted, which was some sort of smile and firm grasp on the shoulder, something that reaffirmed my belief in heaven as baseball utopia.

But I didn’t understand what my uncle - as a grown man, a father, and a son of recently deceased parent - did. Death has nothing to do with baseball.

That fact has remained with me to this day and will remain with me until the day I die: death has nothing to do with baseball.

My grandmother Dolores Poduska died on June 10.

Two weeks before she passed her family came down to be with her in a hospice center in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and we were able to sit with her and talk with her and hear some of her stories and tell her some of our memories.

My grandma held out much longer than anyone expected and a few days later she told my mother, her daughter, about how her favorite place to be in the world was the kitchen of her home in Laurens, Iowa.

Now, my grandmother loved her family, she loved to cook, she loved to play cards, she loved to smoke cigarettes and she loved to have a drink, and there was one place where all of those wonderful vices could mingle into a stew of pure enjoyment for her, and that was the kitchen.

She didn’t love the kitchen because of the furniture or the appliances or the sink, of course. She loved it because it grappled that joyful diaspora of her favorite things into one cozy place. She was the king in that kitchen, and in that kitchen her world was full.

My father and I left Iowa to go back to Minnesota on May 23 after that initial visit. No one was certain about how long she had to live but my father had been there for four days and needed to get home. My mother stayed behind.

On the way home we listened to the Twins beat the Brewers, and 19 days later my grandma died.

2. I have often thought, and I think many people do, about what it would mean to die. About what it would feel like and what would happen and where it would lead or not lead. It is one of two fantastic and utterly incomprehensible gifts that we all share. We share our beginning and we share our end.

As far as my limited mind can grasp what we do for our life, what we do in the middle of those (x,y) points, is to try and find some kind of fulfillment that can make us happier and hopefully make those around us happier. That is all.

What else could there be?

And surely it is within that simple and tiring quest for happiness that we all begin to draft some idea of what a personal heaven would be. Because if there is a heaven it would have to be something like constant and sustained happiness.

That doesn’t mean self-indulgence and greed, it just means base-level happiness, a way to sustain yourself for the benefit of you and the world around you.

And my grandmother found that in the kitchen.

So, logically speaking:

Heaven is happiness

Happiness (for my grandmother) is the kitchen.

Therefore heaven is the kitchen.

3. On the Tuesday after her funeral, my father and I went to the Twins/Pirates game.

We didn’t go for an exercise in catharsis, we went to enjoy the game. We went for an early Father’s Day gift. We went to have a beer and watch the girls go by and listen to the bat and watch Joe Mauer. And we stayed late through a bad game to watch Joe Mauer.

Now, if I ever have kids and I ever have a death bed I can guarantee that at no point will I ever say that my favorite place in the world was at the Metrodome on a summer evening.

Just won’t happen.

That isn’t the point.

Again, it isn’t catharsis.

Death has nothing to do with baseball.

But, what I have found myself thinking more and more about - and I have thought about it exhaustively - is what that meant when my grandmother said that her favorite place in the world was in her kitchen, and how that thought gave her happiness in her final days.

Or on a more basic level I guess I have just been thinking about what happiness is.

And while it may be a stupid and endlessly digressive thought it is nonetheless necessary for me personally if I am to find some way to cope with losing someone I loved on the purest level.

As a quick aside I think I should also mention that I have come to the conclusion that grandmother’s teach children about true love.

This is not the love of a parent which is battle-tested and necessarily weighted by the over-arching necessity of teaching children how to live in a world where they can constantly and endlessly screw up.

Not that love. But the love that you feel if you’ve ever loved a woman (or a man if we have a female reader - or if you’re into men) for the first time. If you’ve ever felt that sort of disgusting and constant love where you start acting stupid and immature and somewhat childish because all of a sudden your head is overflowing with a usually sedate emotion that has come to life like one of those robotic beasts in War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise, and that bastard robot just burrows out of the ground (ostensibly your heart) and flies 1,000 feet into the sky (ostensibly your head) and just begins shooting hellfire all over your life.

That kind of love.

That’s grandma love.

And I loved my grandma endlessly and she loved me back, and so if she is gone than it is imperative that I consider what she meant to me, and how she lived, and what she meant to herself, and I have to seriously consider what it meant when she said that in her kitchen her life was complete.

4. I would say that without question I find happiness in watching baseball, and I find it often.

When my father and I went to that Twins/Pirates game I remember just staring at Mauer behind the plate. He had a certain bevy of routines that were oddly fascinating to watch: the way he dangled his glove lightly between his legs before snapping it up right as the pitcher delivered to home, the way he constantly swept dirt behind home plate starting with his right leg sweeping from left to right and then his left leg from right to left, or the way he would sit down on the pads over his calf muscles right up until the pitch was delivered and than stand just so slightly to create a slight and minimum momentum towards the pitch as it came in.

They weren’t of any real importance, but I remember just smiling and thinking that this is a great thing: to see a great athlete in person. It’s probably an odd thing to say, that watching a grown-man play a sport brings you happiness, but there it is.

5. Still, life isn’t just about happiness. Happiness as an emotional state and entity must have a direct and polar opposite, and unhappiness or anger or depression or sadness comes in a multitude of forms.

My grandmother was an addict. She had strong and nearly life-long addictions. Now, as a grandson I didn’t pick up on any of this until I was about 16. I just loved the woman, she loved me back, we ate awesome food, I rubbed my her scalp all the time, I often stretched the skin on her hands until it was tight and she looked young, I played with her penny jar until she gave me some pennies, she bought me pocket-casino games and spoiled me without hesitation.

She was Grandma Poduska. She was pure love.

But, she was also Grandma Poduska who had a serious and debilitating drinking problem and once chain-smoked in uber-defiance in-front of the whole family as her body was beginning to wilt away and it was apparent she needed care to survive.

She was and is and always will be imperfect.

I’ve always loved imperfect people. I think they’re beyond great. Better than perfect people of course - of which there is none (or only a handful if you subscribe to any number of religions). So, I don’t look down on my grandma for being imperfect and I don’t think she would look down on me for my imperfections.

I neglect everything. Waste everything. I figure I suffer from pride, greed,  envy, lust, occasional gluttony, occasional wrath, and occasional sloth.

That’s all seven of the big ones.

All seven, and I would imagine that at some point in her life my grandma suffered from all seven too.

We were and are and always will be imperfect, and even when she was at the apex of her happiness in the kitchen I imagine that she wasn’t without her imperfections there either.

And while I can often find happiness watching baseball I remember once at a Twins/Red Sox game in 2008 I yelled something along the lines of, “You stupid mother fuc#er!” from the fourth row of the upper-deck bleachers to Ron Gardenhire for not bringing in Joe Nathan in the eighth inning. There were families everywhere. It was right near the kid’s section. I was drunker than hell. Now, Gardy couldn’t hear me, but all those kids could.

We were and we are and we always will be.

6. I really haven’t followed baseball closely for about two months here. Even at the Twins/Pirates game there wasn’t much anger in the loss. I remember my father and I ascending to the exits and briefly revisiting some of the key plays, but there wasn’t much malice in the discussion, I guess we decided there was always the afternoon game on Wednesday.

Still, lately I find myself getting back into it. There still isn’t really any passion. I just kind of watch and especially wait for the Mauer at-bats and at crucial moments I may pay closer attention, but I certainly don’t pace anymore.

I used to pace all the time.

I remember in a White Sox game in 2007 when the Twins were climbing after the Tigers I literally walked from the living room to the kitchen four or five times while Joe Nathan pitched the ninth inning of a one-run game. I had a whole cosmic plan for how to send Nathan good vibes all the way at U.S. Cellular.

But, I haven’t paced much lately, because death brings out the grief and the questions of what it all means.

Still, I guess that probably isn’t what my grandma would want from me.

I often think that baseball is a pointless diversion from the key issues of family and friends and real-life relationships, and my grandmother loved her family and friends first and foremost until the day she died.

But of course there’s always the fact that my grandma loved to gamble.

Absolutely, 120 percent loved it.

My cousin Jenny and I took her gambling once after she had been diagnosed with cancer AND broken her neck falling out of bed.

And she told us to go somewhere else while she played.

I guarantee that in a quiet moment she would have openly admited that given the opportunity to have a slot machine in the kicthen right next to all of her kids and grand kids and great grand kids she would have taken it without hesitation.

I imagine that if there had been a slot-machine in that kitchen and it was over my right shoulder she would have broken mid-conversation to pull that lever and give it a spin.

She loved to gamble.

She had vices.

She was imperfect.

She was a fully-formed and god-blessed and lovely human being.

She loved the kitchen and the kitchen brought her her family and joy and it brought her demons and her nuances. She loved that kitchen, and that kitchen was her place for happiness, but that certainly doesn’t mean she was a saint and everything was perfect there.

And so I figure that if she is in heaven and heaven is happiness then surely my grandma is there with my Grandpa Dennis and an ash-tray and a slot-machine and God is okay with the warts and all.

7. After my grandma died I sort of thought that everything was pointless. That death was the only thing coming for me, and I should concern myself with that. Embrace the certainty and ignore the diversions.

But that’s a selfish and asinine and pathetic thought.

Because baseball is necessary for me.

It is necessary for my happiness.

I have come to see baseball as a diversion, but like cooking and being in the kitchen for my grandma, it is a diversion with a purpose. For me baseball isn’t really about the game or following the Twins, it’s really about my father and my brother and my uncle and my grandfather and my friends.

It’s about talking nonsense with B.J. or having a beer out in the garage with my dad while the game’s on the radio or calling up and bitching about the Yankees with my brother and uncle. It’s just about connecting with the people I love and filling up the void between those (x,y) points.

I know that I need to mourn the fact that my grandma is gone and in that mourning celebrate her life as best I can. I know that this is a time in life where I should focus on what matters most.

So, I will.

Being a gambler and a smoker and a drinker didn’t make my grandma my grandma, and me being her grandson didn’t either. It was all of it. It was the cacophony.

In death she showed me that being alive and in the kitchen and at the casino and in the grips of addiction and pain and bliss and joy is all of it, and that maybe because all of life is so uncertain and so wonderfully circumstantial, that maybe death in all it’s certainty isn’t worth thinking about at all.

And so I guess I am just trying to say that what my grandma is teaching me is that while death has nothing to do with baseball, that certainly doesn’t mean baseball has nothing to do with heaven.

We at Twinscast would like to apologize for our continued and perpetual absence on both the website and the podcast.

It has been a hectic and personally trying month for the two of us - both professionally and existentially.

Starting next week we will be back with regular site updates and regular twice-a-week shows.

Until then, enjoy Joe Mauer.

Also, please recognize that around a month ago Bryant said that Kevin Slowey (the man with the second most wins in the American League) was the pitcher that he was most worried about after one month of the Twins season.

We may have been gone for awhile but trust in the fact that Bryant is still making incorrect and idiotic predictions to me in private and that those will soon be made public.